Monthly Archives: December 2014

I’ve long maintained that participating in this community and also working along with the community is really nice. Overall (and in most instances specifically) everyone is super agreeable and just gets along. When enough people asked that I decided to I start mixing people chow for people one of my major concerns was dealing with jerks.

To date I have YET to deal with a jerk, I can’t decisively say that fear was unfounded but it seems so. I have always maintained that I seem to be dealing with a bunch of people that are pretty similar to me and I’ve always tried to operate the selling stuff as if I was one of the customers. There’s a delay? Send an email. Send tracking info for all packages. Don’t be a jerk (myself to the people I’m mixing for).
So here’s where this rant comes from (background over): Yesterday I got an order from a guy with a note saying that I had accidentally sent him an extra week and the order was paying for the extra week and was therefore already complete, have a nice day.

I was stunned.

I hope we can all be that awesome. Anyhow, rant over. Thanks for not being jerks and being cool.

I hit my 3 month mark on ketosis yesterday (while eating a lettuce wrapped hamburger at Carl’s Jr.) and It’s time for an update.

Weight Oct – Dec 2014

In total I’m down almost 24 lbs. I’m going to be getting a “comprehensive metabolic panel” sometime next week. It will be interesting to compare it to my results from May (when I was eating mostly People Chow). Now to get through Christmas and it’s chocolate oranges with my ketosis intact…

Like this:

On Saturday I finally caught up to the orders that came in following the “Human Dog Food” reddit thread. I even shipped out one order that came in Saturday morning, I think I had it mixed and at the post office within 3 hours of the order being placed!

As for mixing during Christmas: I probably won’t be mixing en-mass until Thursday or Friday (probably Thursday) though I’m going to try to see if I can get a couple local orders and samples done today or tomorrow.

And a final note: trying to maintain ketosis (not eating carbohydrates) during Christmas is really fun (not).

Last night I blew through most of a 25lb bag of coconut flour mixing up Ketofood. I went to order more and, as predicted, the large 25lb bags appear to be out of stock everywhere. I’m not sure if they just stopped making it or if the little notice at the bottom of their product page is relevant

As we transition to our new packaging you may receive either original or new packaging depending on the inventory status of the item(s) you ordered. Thanks for your patience!

Hopefully they’re just switching packaging and in a short time I’ll be able to get the big bags again. Until then I’m stuck ordering 3, 4 or 5 lb bags at around 2x the cost. I raised the price of Ketofood and plan to lower it back down if I can source coconut flour close to the old price. Somebody remind me, OK?

Update: Nutivia replied to my tweet about the stock status: “We hope to have it back in stock by mid-January. Thank you for your patience.” So there you go.

While it’s not as fun as “Fun with Flags” here are some fun graphs. Here’s my weight since I started doing keto. High spot is 257.8, this morning I was 238.0 (Thursday I was 235 but I ate a LOT of shrimp and prime rib on Friday):

I got myself and my wife each a Jarv Premium Bluetooth® 4.0 Smart Heart Rate Monitor and have been using https://my.digifit.com to track workouts (mostly treadmill and elliptical). They do a really good job and were half or less the cost of comparable ones. They work great with our phones and appear to be very accurate. Digifit tracks time, heart rates and the like and has some cool dashboards. The graph above is calories burned while wearing the heart rate monitor. Did pretty well last week, we’ll see how well this week goes.

There was a reddit thread last night that caused a lot of interest in official and DIY soylent – and a pretty massive surge in visits to my site. It was pretty funny to see the stats going a little crazy. Below is site traffic according to WordPress:

Here is site traffic according to Google Analytics:

You can see in increased database queries on the backend:

But it’s not nearly enough to significantly impact the load on the processors:

Wow, what a difference! The Anthony’s is is more of a finely shredded not-powder while the Nutiva is a darker color (slightly toasted?) and a much finer grind. It’s more like actual flour. I tried adding in some xanthan gum to the mix as well and the consistency was much improved, overall it was awfully close to Ketosoy except sweetened with stevia instead of sucralose. I’m going to have to keep experimenting with this.

Following a question on reddit I went through the nutrient info for just about all of the ingredients and made sure the info was as complete and accurate as I could get.

The recipe has 92.3g of total carbs with 62.2g of insoluble fiber, 10.8g of soluble fiber. Including the soluble fiber in the equation, that gives 30.1g net carbs. If all you’re eating for the entire day is this recipe (which is possible) then you’ll get 30g net. It looks like the number 1 source of net carbs is the raw cocoa powder which turns out to have more net carbs than originally thought. It’d be interesting to tweak that ingredient.

There are also now 4 oil entries on the page: MCT, Olive, Canola and liquid Coconut. I have the olive and canola zeroed out for my own usage because I’m trying MCT + coconut right now. I was surprised to find some at Walmart.

It’s interesting to see the difference between MCT, liquid coconut and regular coconut oils:

Caprylic Acid (C8:0)

Capric Acid (C10:0)

Lauric Acid (C12:0)

NOW MCT

55.71%

44.29%

0.00%

Carrington Liquid coconut

32.86%

26.43%

5.00%

Regular Coconut Oil

9.00%

10.00%

52.00%

While the liquid coconut oil has quite a bit more of the smaller MCTs, it doesn’t have as much of the Lauric Acid that makes it solid at room temp. Looking at this breakdown of different oils, there aren’t many oils that contain MCTs. As a refresher, the reason you want MCTs when you’re doing ketosis is they get converted almost directly into ketones so it will help you achieve and maintain ketosis better. I bought a bottle of liquid coconut oil and substituted it for the canola I had been using for half of my fat calories. It’ll be an interesting experiment. It adds right around $1 a day to the cost.

I was wrong, it appears the chia seeds are not ground. Personally I don’t particularly like the taste of ground chia seeds due to my experience with the “induction phase” recipe. Anyhow, not being ground (or at least not ground very much) the result is you get seeds in your mouth to chew on. Take *THAT* mr. “soylent is teh worst thing evuh because you don’t chew!!!1111eleventy”

At this point I’m not sure if it’s the milk protein concentrate or the xanthan and guar gums but the texture is quite smooth. Like REALLY smooth. I also suspect he’s using less coconut flour that ketofood because I can’t really make out much of a coconut flavor.

I was worried putting all the sweetener packets would be too much, it wasn’t. Probably could have done two in each (instead of 1.6666).

It actually tastes quite a lot like the Soylent 1.0 official, for that matter I like the taste much better because it’s not as sweet and it’s less gritty

Still chewing the chia seeds, it’s kinda fun actually.

My wife tried some too and liked it.

On the milk protein concentrate front there’s some discussion on the differences between the two in addition to some fun information here. I’m not currently lifting weights so it’s likely not a big deal to me to have quick recovery and whatnot. I’m interested to see the nutrition difference and amino acid profile of milk protein concentrate, specifically the net carbs and how complete the protein is for human requirements. If Milk Protein concentrate is comparable and gives better soylent, then it would merit further investigation.

In what would appear to be a resounding conflict of interest, I’m going to do a review on ketosoy. Hey, he was nice enough to send it to me (thanks!) I figure and honest, objective review is in order. So let’s get going!

So I got a day’s worth, it came in a standard USPS letter size package. Padding is competely unnecessary for this and there wasn’t any damage to the envelope. I managed to smear the “contents” label there on the front when I put the package face down on a still-damp-from-cleaning counter. both labels on the front appear to have been made with an inkjet printer and smearing when wet is something that’s to be expected. I’m guessing these early production runs are like that until more permanent packaging is finalized.

OK, back label time! there’s some stuff to note: the nutrition facts are for 1/3 of the pouch or 1 “meal” so stuff should be giving you around 33% of your totals. I’m going to throw out a wild guess and say that if you were to take a multivitamin like the Kirkland Signature Daily Multi Vitamin specified in the ketofood recipe you’ll probably get 100% of your RDA. That said, the vitamin D is awfully low (but then we don’t have to get into a heated discussion about the merits of D3 vs. D2). I was a bit surprised to see it has milk protein concentrate, as opposed to the typical whey protein isolate. That would mean that it has more of the “stuff” from the milk instead of just the protein. Some lactose intolerant people can have WPI but can’t have concentrate. I’m guessing the “edible grasses” is for fiber and vitamin K. Horray for not bleeding to death! The primary oil is Olive which was apparent when I mixed it up (looked like olive).

So here’s what’s inside. Splenda is sucralose. The instructions say to “sweeten to taste” – yeah I just barely noticed that now. I put all 5 packets into my 3 bottles and I’m guessing it’s going to be pretty intense. Dangit. The paper-covered foil packet opened easily and looks nice, the dark green oil container will keep the oils from oxidizing from UV light; this will keep the vitamin K in the oils from being destroyed. Again: horray for not bleeding to death.

It’s like winning the lottery: I got an extra 4.6g of ketosoy! =) I mixed up three bottles after glancing at the rather sparse mixing instructions. It’s really not complicated though, and well, I’ve done pretty much the same thing before. After mixing I stuck all three bottles in the fridge and I’ll try it out tomorrow.

Up close, Ketosoy looks an awful lot like Ketofood – well except for the splenda there on top. I think the chia seeds are ground (good) but I didn’t remember to check close. Dangit again. Anyhow, time for bed – I’ll do a followup when I actually taste it tomorrow. Here is the follow-up.

Loosely following the recipe for “Fat Bombs” from this site, I put all the coconut flour plus the caloric equivalent in Coconut oil to all of my MCT and other oil into these little guys

Ended up with 100g of coconut flour that I toasted in the oven for about 10 minutes and 104g of coconut oil that happily melted when I put the still hot from toasting flour on it. I also put in a little stevia powder and completely forgot the part form the recipe about a little salt. Bah. Then I stuck them in the fridge for 15 minutes and got these.

They taste very good. It does have the same desiccating effect on my mouth that eating 10 saltines would have though. I put one in my mouth whole and spent the next 10 minutes sipping water, trying not to choke.

The trade off of doing this is: my regular meals don’t have any oil and no coconut flour. The effect on the flavor of the now mostly chia+raw cocoa+soy lecithin+salt and potassium citrate drink isn’t pleasant. It ends up being pretty bitter, I’m thinking it’s the raw cocoa and the potassium citrate. I added some additional stevia to make it moar better-er and I can drink it without shuddering too bad, but at this point it’s nearly the same experience I had with the induction phase recipe.

I’m going to call this experiment an overall failure. Though the “fat bombs” really are pretty tasty, they don’t make up for the taste of the drink portion. I might try it again with just the coconut oil and maybe some peanut butter, while leaving the coconut flour for the drink part, dunno.

KetoChow on Social Media

The content of this website is not intended for the treatment or prevention of disease, nor as a substitute for medical treatment, nor as an alternative to medical advice. Use of recommendations is at the choice and risk of the reader. If you are on any medication, please consult with your family doctor before starting any new eating plan. Keto Chow is not intended to treat, cure or prevent any disease. Pregnant or breast feeding women should consult their health care professional before consuming.